This Tale of Once Upon A Time
by Gypsy Feet
Summary: In the end it comes down to semantics and which word she’s going to fixate on. She just never thought it would lead to this. J/S to a degree. One Shot. prompted by pika-la-cynique's drawing on dev art.


This Tale of Once Upon A Time  
Rating: safe for all  
AN: So I've not done this for ages and not for this fandom. I just got curious over how many writers write Jareth as the one forever in control. No that such a thing is bad in any way, simply I wanted to see if the following version of him - more quiet and less domineering - was believeable as well. Also I liked the idea of the crystal Sarah catches at the end as meaning more than simply winning Toby, as the crystals are Jareth's calling card and connected throughout the movie with Sarah's dreams. Which is hardly even subtext anymore, is it, when you put it like that.

This Tale of Once Upon A Time

-

Once upon a time she dreamt of fairies and families and escape and happy endings and a world where she was _enough._ Enough for her Dad to stay unmarried. Enough for her Mother to _stay_. Enough for Toby to stop crying when he was left alone with her. Enough to catch the occasional glance from a guy. Enough to be noticed. Enough to be liked.

And when she dreamt for those things she stretched herself to fit her ideals : demanding and exuberant and loud and off-centre. She argued and wheedled and smiled at boys and shouted her laughter loud when she slam-dunked her apple cores into a bin. She kept her hair straight and long so that she stood out in a crowd and stuck to muted colours and shied away from bright lipsticks.

Now she dreams of other things – or she thinks them different. She dreams of scorched skies and getting a car and teeming forests and grotesque masques and moving somewhere else. She wants to leave the shell of her old life – Linda Williams' daughter and college and the girl with the split parents and all her other roles. She wants to arrive somewhere and be _her_, not who she _should_ be.

In the end it comes down to semantics and which word she's going to fixate on.

She just never thought it would lead to this.

-

Her flat is silent-still-empty in the way that still feels hollow in the echoing aftermath of college. She'd thought she was ready for the change, ready for the quiet, but she's changed her mind since, or else she's yet to get used to it. She wants a cat that will wrap around her legs in greeting and do creative things to her curtains so she can scold it. She wants to spill a drink on her new rug or have more work papers to stick up on her walls. She wants something that says 'Sarah lives here'. Something that looks less bare and new.

In the end she drops her work stuff on the coffee table she talked out of her ex and makes herself a scalding coffee, three teaspoons too strong to knock the exhaustion from her eyes. It's no surprise- lots of alcohol and no sleep isn't the best recipe for a productive day after – but that doesn't mean she's got any time for it.

It's still quiet when she finishes it.

She thinks about ringing home, but Karen will want to drive the two hour trip to cheer her up, now that they're 'friends' in the way they never managed to be 'mother and daughter'. It'd be nice, but Sarah knows that it would complicate things too much. Besides, they'd end up drinking all her cheap wine and watching bad shows which she could do on her own if she were so inclined. She might as well just get her work finished and get to bed so she feels better tomorrow. Yes, she thinks, that is a clever, sensible thing to do.

She goes to her room and is bathed in eerie crystal light.

-

By rights it shouldn't surprise her, not really. It's sitting beside the mysterious white feather that was sitting on her pillow the day after her twenty-first. It isn't as if things don't _happen_, they just. Just.

Some things shouldn't need to be explained.

The stark light of it belies the clutter on her desk. It's contrived, the same way the too-many posters and paintings on her wall are. Means by which she can pretend not to be lonely, adrift in her new life and new world and the quiet presumptions of her colleagues. The eccentric daughter of an actress with her curious eyes and strange fashion sense.

It's him sitting on her bed that she misses at first.

The light doesn't really reach that corner of the room, only caught in two stark highlights spun in his eyes. He's not moving, wearing the shadows like a royal robe: the sharp lines of his jacket slipping seamlessly into the dark. Yet for all of that quiet subterfuge of darkness, his presence – he's too real. It is somehow as if, now that she's noticed him, some part of her has unlocked: as if he's always been sitting there and always will be, and she and her room are just temporary witnesses, just seeing him briefly, joining him and soon to fall away to the past while he stays forever.

She squashes the immediate panicked responses quickly – she's not so young and naive now that she'd risk losing the upper hand so cheaply. This is, after all, her flat and her world.

"Sarah," he acknowledges, breathed out too-familiar, as if he'd savoured the shape of it in his mouth.

"Yes."

He doesn't say anything more, at first, simply studies her with his foreign expression: too blank. There is no challenge in the set of his mouth, no teasing in the contours of his eyes. He raises a hand and somewhere in the space of one second to the next a crystal appears in it that he spins idly as he watches her. It's unnerving – the entire situation is – but she sets her shoulders and reshuffles the pages on her desk, setting the feather and crystal to the side and placing her bag in the cleared space, brushing a persistent strand of hair from her eyes.

"This isn't my fault." Whispered just behind her.

She turns, startled, and frowns angrily.

"What?"

He doesn't answer but for a raised eyebrow.

She passes a hand over her eyes, she's still got a dull headache, and returns to the unpacking of her work. Everything smells faintly of the banana that squashed in her bag the other day, which does nothing for her stomach. She's trying to calm the rising flourish of emotions his words kindled. The bitter despair and frustration that has built over the years between the time she saw him last, swathed in barn-owl feathers and strange declarations. She takes a breath and lets it out again to steady herself, thinks about drama class and prays her voice stays steady.

"You promised me everything."

"You refused." Quick as a flash and heavy with contempt. An accusation.

"I am not going to try and justify _saving my brother_, Jareth."

"What did you call me?" he demands.

"Jareth. That is your name, isn't it?"

He's strangely still, searching her face before breathing "_Hoggle_" with something darker than fury. It's terrifying. She blinks and he's back on her bed, legs crossed comfortably and composed once more.

"This isn't why I came."

The crystal on her desk fades into a small olive branch, and she fights the strange urge to think that it had always been so. She brushes her fingers over the leaves and swallows something impolite and useless. His tone is something familiar to her own ears, one she'd heard in her voice time and again. She wraps her arms around herself and digs her nails into the flesh between her ribs, a finger slipping to each ridge.

"Why?"

She can see a little of him, a vague smudge of his features in the corner of her mirror, and so she sees him give a measured shrug.

"Sometimes it takes silence before someone will hear what they need to." He doesn't make it clear who he's speaking of.

"That wasn't an answer to my question."

He smiles strangely. "But it _was_ an answer." He returns his focus to the crystal before murmuring, "Come here."

She does as she is told. She doesn't want to, truly, but there was something in the command that compels her towards him, something not unlike the instantaneous supposition of his eternal presence and the permanence of the olive branch. She did simply because it was right that she should. It unnerves her, the ease with which he could manipulate her, for all she'd claimed equality, freedom and safety from him, once upon a time.

"Sarah," again he says her name with relish, as he pats the bed beside where he sits. She joins him. "You aren't lonely."

The words are strange, they don't fit into what she'd expected, what she'd apprehended and prepared for. She opens her mouth to demand an explanation, perhaps to defend her mellow tragedy. Before she can, though, he raises his hand and drops the crystal onto her head and it turns to water, splashing down over her, leaving her dry all the same.

Her response freezes deep inside her as a series of images and impressions swamp her: eerily vast and destitute, alone with no-one at all that is her true equal, no-one at all that dared challenge her or see her as worthy. Always feared or misunderstood or despised and forever the minder. Forever looking after a world of feebleminded creatures and petty tragedies. Her skin crawls with it, her head feels too full, as if suddenly she couldn't fit within herself any longer. Yet just as soon as it begins it is gone and her breath follows it, leaving in a violent, shuddering sigh.

"That isn't all." She opens her eyes and finds him watching her with his mismatched eyes, intent with his gloved hand resting fisted against his chest. He opens it, and cupped in it is a few drops of water, he lifts it to his lips and blows: it collects in his breath and falls on her as fine glitter.

Following that is a set of different sensations: fascination and envy and intrigue. A strange needy tug in her chest and beneath her tongue, quiet and insinuated into her very being. And at the centre of it, she finds that what is desired is not mayhem or disruption or riches or anything other than her: anyway at all. Simply her presence or an approximation of if: to hear her voice or see her shadow or touch her hair or kiss every inch of her. All of her, in every way and mood and time.

This one dwindles slowly, leaving her to herself at last with the sensation of cool hands brushing down her arms and a strange tingling in the tips of her fingers.

"I offered you your dreams, Sarah, and in denying those superficial fancies you earned more than just your brother."

"I—" she stops herself and passes her tongue over her too-dry lips. He wants _her_. He'd given her at last the one thing she wanted above everything else, made no complaint over her manifold imperfections. She reaches a tentative hand out to touch his cheek: he looks younger, or perhaps older, it's difficult to tell in the second-hand light of the living room. "I didn't _know_."

Her finger traces the upswept line of his brow and slips on, brushing the hand into his hair curiously and touching her other to his cheek. She shifts so that she is kneeling beside him, caught up in her reverie.

"No," he acknowledges, something slightly dark in the twitching grin on his lips. "Sometimes it takes silence before someone will hear what they need to."

She smiles at that, softened under the weight of his truths and the fairytale hue of the air about them. His eyes dart to her lips before lifting again, calm and unchallenging, as if merely observing her. She brings a hand back to his temple, brushing carefully through his hair again as she leans forward, compensating gracefully as a spring below her knee groans and gives way abruptly. It is not a kiss of intention, not born from desire to own or dominate. She simply brushes her lips against his, a second, sways back a little before returning again, more firmly. She opens her mouth enough to touch the tip of her tongue to his lower lip and pulls back, thumb resting just below his ear and fingers spread in his odd hair.

He stays completely still but for the uneven breaths that stutter over her cheek and catch a strand of her own hair, that move his chest in little, jerky lurches. The light has caught on the little damp patch on his lip and she watches it, fascinated.

"Come away with me." His voice little more than a sigh.

She jerks back, a hand to his shoulder to steady herself, millions of objections flying frantically through her mind.

"What? No. No I—I _can't_."

His gaze darts restlessly over her face, studying her eyes before shaking his head.

"You can."

"No I – what about my father? And Toby? I've a _life_ here. I have _friends_ and a—a family, and work! I can't just—just."

He closes his eyes. "Two lives. Two lives, Sarah, please. I will give you lifetimes underground, years beyond your imagination and when you find yourself lonely you only need say. I swear it to you. You will return and it will be mere minutes, or days, since last you were here. They can last as long as you, if you wish it. "

He lifts a hand up and resting on his fingers is another crystal.

"I ask nothing but your company."

He is watching her once more, face shuttered. The memory of that first horrifying wash of sensations is still to fresh for her to leave behind. The weight of the years and the strange, foreign coolness of his brow and those startling eyes. He is nothing and everything like she remembered, more and less and strong and weak and _God_. This is more than she let herself wish, more than she even imagined.

Her answer is whispered, the way they always are in the best of fairytales.

-

For all of Sarah's dreams, for all they changed and grew and varied they were always washed in brilliant colours. Vivid and shining and painful for how close to genuine they were. For how close they were to something she could believe.

And then, one day, they came true.

-


End file.
